December 21, 2008
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Experience and Thoughts
When you experience something, you experience it as a whole idea, not as the many smaller parts that comprise it. All art is like this. Paintings, people, or life at all.
But I tend to think a lot about anything I experience, looking at it from every angle possible, most times interrupting the experience itself to start doing so. Because of this, a question often comes to me.
Does analysis destroy beauty?
EDIT: From Walt Whitman.
When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and
measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much
applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
Comments (10)
I don’t know sometimes it can. sometimes we just have to experience something and even if we forget it…the exactly details we don’t pull it apart and try to add something to it that isn’t part of it. I think analysis can help preserve beauty while in a away changing it
I agree with MCTCanadian. Analysis can pick a beautiful thing apart into ugly little pieces, or it can reveal hidden beauties that are invisible to the casual observer.
Real beauty is intrinsic, can be experienced but not fully, and never know completely.
Analysis is its own beauty.
@MCTCanadian -
Your comment was quite beautiful..but let’s say we analyze it…
What matters more, the class of objects or the method of analysis?
For instance, there are things like being in love, which may can consume one completely, or experiences of nature, like standing atop a mountain and viewing the miles of surrounding forest. I get the sense people think it is wrong to stringently scrutinize these things more than, say, a book or painting. Does the class of objects matter?
Or there is the method of analysis. It may be the case that whatever the thing being analyzed, a person may kill it by being too pedantic or insensitive to the experience behind the analysis. My friends dislike several of my favorite movies and point out things like bad acting or cliche lines as their reasons for doing so, things I had not noticed. Or take the example of the poem I added to the post.
regardless of how we try to define… its still the personal experience of the ‘author’ ‘viewer’ ‘reader’ ‘seer’ person.. that ultimately defines the experience, to the individual.
i guess i am back to xanga. Experience and thoughts. “they are like all singing, all-dancing crap of the world”-fight club.
I’m voting that method matters most in analysis, because method effects the way we view the object after it has been analyzed (your movie example). This brings me back to your original question. And I say that analysis does not kill beauty, method does. I suppose it’s rather obvious why good teachers are so valuable. They have discovered the method that developes true beauty.
Great comments all, there are some top-notch thoughts in here. !
I’m with immortalwithout on this one. The first thing that popped into my head was the beauty of nature I’ve had the pleasure of examining, from the intricate cellular structures in a leaf to the crystalline formations of ice. Ignorance is bliss, but acceptance is greater.